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Saturday, June 2, 2012

Snow White and the Huntsman

SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

** SPOILERS **

Snow White and the Huntsman is as empty as the core of a poison apple. Blending lush, sumptuous production values with a plodding, threadbare story, #SWATH, as is its preferred hashtag on Twitter, is like Game of Thrones for dummies, right down to the seven Imps and the blonde brother and sister strongly implied to be humping. In a fairy tale world closely resembling medieval England, including Snow White uttering Christian prayers, evil Charlize Theron bamboozles the King into marrying her in a day and then stabbed him in their honeymoon bed. Everyone in the castle loyal to the dead King immediately skedaddled once Charlize easily won the game of thrones.

Now Queen, Charlize goes on to do absolutely nothing but frown miserably and fret to her creepy moron brother and her liquid gold magic mirror about how she can stay eternally young. You see, Charlize is a sorceress who can remain immortal, but she has to do things like eat bird hearts and suck in the life force of comely maidens. She's also immune to being stabbed. Charlize doesn't enjoy herself in the slightest as Queen, but we can all agree being a miserable young-ish monarch beats being old and poor. The magic mirror tells her, at least ten years into her reign, that the answer to all her problems is Snow White, the fairest of them all. Charlize has to eat her heart, or something (the mirror was vague), and she'll instantly look like a movie star forever, and not like she did when she won an Oscar for Monster. The mirror does warn that only Snow White can kill Charlize, so that's troublesome.

Kristen Stewart is Princess Snow White, whom Charlize locked in a tower the day she killed her royal daddy. Charlize then apparently forgot all about her. Stewart is still considered the fairest of them all, despite rotting in a dank stone cell uneducated and not shaving her legs for a decade. Yet for some reason, Charlize allowed her leather pants and boots, which come in very handy when Stewart escapes captivity and goes on the lam. Stewart absconds to the Tim Burton Dark Forest, where magic mushrooms shoot psychedelic mist in her face and really trips her out, man. Whoa, does that tree, like, have bat wings?! To track Stewart down, Charlize enlists the help of Chris Hemsworth, the Huntsman of Thunder, a swarthy but honorable drunk who swings the uru ax Mjolnir. Hemsworth takes not very long at all to decide helping Stewart escape to the Duke's castle, the Duke being the only guy loyal to the King but hasn't done anything to rise up against Charlize for a decade, is better than helping that bitch on the throne.

Thus, Snow White and the Huntsman spend what seems like an eternity wandering across the land Lord of the Rings-style trying to get to the Duke's castle while chased by all the Queen's horses and men. They spend the night in the Fishing Village of Scarfaced Ladies then find their way into Live Action Disney Forest, where they meet the Seven Dwarves. The Dwarves are fine British actors like Ian McShane, Toby Jones, Ray Winstone and Nick Frost, whose heads are computer generated into actual dwarves' bodies. When Stewart wanders off and meets Harry Potter's Patronus, a silver stag, everyone realizes Snow White is magic and decides to help her kill Charlize. Charlize, really stressed out as she grows more and more wizened and crone-like in her castle, goes on a rare field trip. She takes the form of Stewart's childhood boyfriend and feeds her a poisoned apple. Then Snow White dies. The End.

As I was getting ready to leave the theater, I learned to my dismay it wasn't The End. Stewart is merely in a coma, but I say she was faking it like Buster Bluth on Arrested Development. She was faking it so she could get a kiss from teary-eyed Thor. #KissFromThor wakes Stewart up and, once she realizes she isn't a vampire, she gives an earnest but considerably less-than-Braveheart-level speech to get everyone to follow her into war against the Queen. Hemsworth compliments Stewart that she looks "quite fetching in [chain]mail". She does, indeed. Meanwhile, no one gave Hemsworth any armor. No armor for a mere Huntsman?

And so it was Kristen Stewart led an army in full heraldry to siege her father's castle. With her best "Grrr! Here I come!" face usually reserved for Edward Cullen, Stewart somehow survives flaming catapults, a hail of arrows, boiling oil and a clusterfuck of a battle long enough to make it into the Queen's chambers to confront Charlize. Too bad she didn't train to fight or swing a sword or anything. Hemsworth taught her one basic block-and-stab maneuver in the forest. Sure enough, it's all she needs when an overconfident Charlize got too close as she reached to pluck her heart from her chest. As the magic mirror foretold, only Stewart is (arguably) pretty enough to kill beautiful Charlize. Snow White and the Huntsman finally ends with the curious sight of Kristen Stewart crowned as Queen of what's essentially England, even though she routinely forgets to speak with a British accent throughout the movie. No one at that coronation looks happily ever after.